Tomorrow I will have a review of Jeremy Hunt’s time as Chancellor, nearly one year on.

However much Britons say it would be better if we were still part of the EU, reality shows that their member states are also struggling with economic pressures.

I have been particularly incensed with opposition MPs in the Commons bloviating about how awful the British economy is compared with those of EU countries.

As such, here are a few facts.

A few weeks after The Times featured an article on British grocery price inflation rates hitting a record 17.1% in February, EuroNews had a March 16 story, ‘”I can’t save money”: Spain’s supermarket inflation hits record high’ (emphases mine):

… Juan, 36, complains to his wife about rising prices every time he comes back from the supermarket.

It’s not an unusual scene in a Spanish household: in the last year, the cost of living has been steeply rising, with prices of food and non-alcoholic beverages leading the way.

But this time around, it has been too much. February hit a record high, with an average weekly food basket increasing 16.6% compared to the same month last year, according to the latest data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE).

Last month’s increase has been the highest since 1994, when detailed records were first started. 

“This situation is forcing us to keep looking and comparing prices,” Juan told Euronews. The engineer, who lives with his wife and six-month-old baby says he’s seen a 20% increase in the price of his shopping basket compared to last year. 

And he knows his numbers.

“I keep comparing prices online. I have set on every phone alert on supermarket apps, especially for the baby’s nappies, and I only buy when a bargain comes up,” he says.

For Mara, a 56-year-old carer for the elderly, the situation has become much more complicated since inflation put pressure on the price of her shopping basket.

She is a ‘mileurista’, a term used in Spain for those with a salary barely reaching €1,000 per month.

That amount has to be cleverly used to feed “three and a half people”, as she counts her grandson with whom she spends weekends too.

“I used to spend €50 a week on groceries, now I pay more than €125”, says the Spaniard.

Mara has been forced to cut on some products. “We had to stop buying beef and now we only eat chicken and turkey. We also stopped buying some of our favourite fruits, such as watermelon until we see the price drop,” she adds …

Mara recieves her salary on a weekly basis and she uses it to pay her rent. Before she managed to put a little money aside in case something unexpected happened, but inflation has made this impossible.

“I can’t save money now”, she laments.

These are the products that are becoming more expensive:

Fresh foods, such as vegetables and fruit, have seen the steepest price rises. 

It has especially affected fresh vegetables, which have become 11.2% more expensive in the last two months alone.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs argues that this is due to the fact that there is less supply “as a result of unfavourable weather conditions”, both in Spain and in other EU countries … 

According to the National Statistics Institute, the greatest increase has been seen in sugar, where prices have risen by 52.6% in the last twelve months; followed by butter (39.1%), sauces and seasonings (33.8%), olive oil (33.5%) and whole milk (33.2%).

This steep rise has taken place despite the government trying to control price rises — and the impact on households — by reducing VAT on some basic products.

For example, the reduction has cut VAT from 4% to 0% on fresh products; and cut VAT from 10% to 5% on oil and pasta.

Other measures introduced by the government to curb the crisis are a €200 grant for people on low incomes, and €300 million aid to farmers to help offset increased fertilizer prices.

The article has this chart about Spanish food price inflation:

Wages are not rising in line with inflation, something Britons know only too well:

“There has been a brutal loss of purchasing power because wages are not reacting to rising prices in the same way. That’s why families are having a hard time and need to adjust their budgets,” explains Carlos Martín, director of Comisiones Obreras economic bureau, Spain’s main trade union.

“According to the latest data available, the average wage has grown by around 3%, while food prices are rising by up to 16.6%,” he adds.

Spain is not the only European country affected:

… high food prices are also imposing cost burdens on households across Europe.

Food price inflation in the EU was 18.2% year-on-year in January, according to the latest detailed data from Eurostat.

Rising costs, starting in 2021 and worsened with the outbreak of war in Ukraine a year ago, are the main cause, along with lower production in the field due to poor harvests.

EuroNews had an article on the overall situation in Europe, ‘Minimum wages have declined because of soaring inflation. This is how things stand across Europe’:

In 2022, inflation rates rocked the EU, reaching levels not seen before in the previous four decades.

Low-income households are struggling to cope with the resulting cost-of-living crisis. Almost all EU member states have increased the minimum wage in the last two years, but rising inflation has led to a decline in real wages …

In the EU, the annual inflation rate was 11.5 per cent in October 2022, up from 4.4 per cent a year earlier. Between 1997 and late 2021, the highest annual inflation was only 4.4 percent as recorded in July 2008.

This dramatic increase in inflation is disproportionally hitting the most vulnerable low-income households.

Minimum wages have recently risen in many EU countries, but that increase has been in nominal terms. In other words, inflation is not taken into account.

As of September 2022, the real minimum wage – or the wage reflecting the impact of inflation – had decreased in many EU countries over the last year.

The article goes on to give more detail about various EU countries’ minimum wages.

It was good to see that the UK was included in the statistics reported:

Looking at 19 countries (17 EU member states, the UK, and Turkey), the real minimum wage had increased only in Turkey (15.9 per cent), France (2.3 per cent), and Belgium (1.9 per cent) compared to figures for September 2021.

According to the OECD, statistical methodology may have an impact on the reported annual changes in real minimum wages in France and Belgium as minimum wages are indexed differently in these countries.

The article’s accompanying chart shows that the UK’s annual change in real minimum wages has gone down by 2%, which compares favourably with those of Germany (1%) and Luxembourg (1.7%). Greece comes in below the UK, also with a 2% decrease. Contrast those figures with that of the Netherlands, which is near the bottom of the list with 9.8%:

The highest decline occurred in Latvia at 18.2 per cent. In most countries, the annual decrease was more than 5 per cent …

All EU member states, the UK, and Turkey raised their minimum wages between January 2021 and September 2022, but changes in real minimum wages reveal that these increases often fell short of the impact of inflation.

The case of Turkey is interesting as the real minimum wage has increased by 24.6 per cent since December 2020.

The Turkish government usually raises the minimum wage once a year, every January. However, it considerably increased the minimum wage in July 2022 as annual inflation had reached 79 per cent in June.

On June 30, The Telegraph highlighted problems elsewhere in the EU, ‘Fears of a new inflation crisis stalk recession-hit Germany’:

… German inflation peaked at 11.6pc according to Eurostat data, above Britain’s 11.1pc peak and worse than the eurozone’s average of 10.6pc.

Even now, despite an easing of the energy crisis and food price crunch in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the country is still struggling to get a grip on costs …

Europe’s biggest economy is in recession, when Britain has proven a touch more resilient, eking out growth despite the crushing pressure of the cost of living crisis.

German GDP is 0.5 percentage points below its pre-Covid level – on a par with Britain’s poor performance, but going in the wrong direction even as the UK weathers the storm.

While household and business confidence in the British economy appears to be stabilising or recovering, even in the face of mounting interest rates, the opposite is true in Germany, boding ill for the rest of the year …

Europe’s consumers are spending more enthusiastically on services, and particularly holidays, rather than goods, a development which favours the continent’s sunny south rather than German industry.

The country’s long-term fundamentals face threats including from technological leaps – its car manufacturers have been slow to shift to electric vehicles – as well as climate change, threatening its reliance on fossil fuels, and demographic change.

Jens Eisenschmidt, economist at Morgan Stanley, says the German economy relies on large numbers of migrants to make up for its shrinking workforce, yet inflows are fading, undermining its growth prospects.

“The underlying trend of steady migration is slowing down – and intra EU migration is actually going into reverse,” according to his analysis.

“Add to that, refugees are not necessarily (immediately) adding to the labour force in the same way that migrants arriving in Germany for non-humanitarian reasons do. So the risk is high that Germany falls well short of the needed 400,000 migrants every year.”

Meanwhile Germany’s woes add to the European Central Bank’s challenges.

It has to set interest rates for the entire currency area, aiming to get inflation to 2pc over the medium term.

A one-size-fits-all policy is exceptionally tricky when Spain’s prices are up by just 1.6pc, while Italy’s inflation of 6.7pc is almost at German levels.

Furthermore:

… higher interest rates risk pushing Germany’s economic crunch onto more of its neighbours, which will in turn reduce demand for its exports.

So far the ECB has raised its headline deposit rate to 3.5pc, up from a low of minus 0.5pc. More rate rises are expected in July and again in September as policymakers seek to pull down core inflation.

“The eurozone as a whole is in recession, by the finest of fine margins,” says [Jack] Allen-Reynolds [of Capital Economics].

Despite what the left-leaning media and opposition politicians say, we’re better off out of the EU.